David Wallace-Wells

Viewing the Climate Through Wildfire Smoke

/ Peter Bardaglio / Leave a comment

We woke up to a new reality in Ithaca and Tompkins County this week. Smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Canada filled the air, carried south by the jet stream. We’re used to complaining about the gray weather in the Finger Lakes, but this was different. The sky turned yellow, brown, and orange, casting an apocalyptic-like glow across our much-loved landscape, and temperatures dropped rapidly as the sun dimmed.

Schools canceled outdoor activities, the public health department urged people to stay indoors, and masks put away after the COVID pandemic were retrieved. This wasn’t supposed to happen here. We thought we were spared the awful consequences of wildfires spreading destruction, fear, and even death. We thought these kinds of events were confined to the West, not something we had to worry about in verdant upstate New York

Quebec wildfire in June.

We found out this week, however, that smoke doesn’t respect national borders and far-flung catastrophes thousands of miles away can have a terrible impact on our community here. The planet, it turns out, is a small place.

“As Smoke Darkens the Sky, the Future Becomes Clear” — that was the headline of David Wallace-Wells’ New York Times column on Wednesday. The lesson is a simple one: as the planet heats up, the fuel for wildfire dries out, waiting to burst into flames. Wallace-Wells recounts a recent interview with John Vaillant, author of “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World,” in which he observes ominously that “Fire isn’t going away. We’re going to be burning for this entire century.”

Understanding that we are entering a new epoch, what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls “the pyrocene,” brings new urgency to the task of building electrification and decarbonization. We need to renew our commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Ithaca and Tompkins County and work to make the future less harrowing for the generations to come.

This smoke-filled week has also underscored the importance of getting our elected officials to take action on the key climate and energy issues before them. It’s been especially frustrating to watch the current legislative session in Albany wind down as many crucial bills remain stuck in committee. This is especially true in the General Assembly, where the leadership has sat on legislation that would clearly pass if sent to the floor.

There have been some significant victories, among them the All-Electric Building Act, the nation’s first ban on the use of fossil fuels in new construction, and the Build Public Renewables Act, which will expand the development of publicly-produced clean energy. Furthermore, a dangerous effort to water down the state’s landmark climate law was defeated.

But it remains to be seen if the Senate-approved NY HEAT Act, which would end subsidized gas hookups and reduce utility bills for low- and middle-income families, will be acted on in the waning hours of the General Assembly session. In addition, efforts to end at least some of the $1.4 billion annual tax subsidies for fossil fuels, reduce plastic packaging, divest the state teachers’ pension fund from fossil fuels, make climate polluters pay for the ongoing environmental damage they have caused, and provide protections for environmental justice communities languish in the wings. It is a mixed record at best.

As Philip Kennicott reminds us in yesterday’s Washington Post, “change is possible” and “the world doesn’t need to be this way.” In his words, “The tools we need to reverse climate change are already here, and perhaps even better ones will emerge.” Clearly, the time to put these tools to work is now.

The Acceleration in Global Renewables

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The latest report from the climate front is a doozy. According to a new study, the global warming that has already occurred will cause a sea level rise of more than 10 inches from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet alone. That much is baked in. How much worse can it get? “With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean,” the Guardian warns, “a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.”

Obviously, this is very bad news for the nearly 600 million people who live in coastal zones worldwide.

Aftermath of flooding in Pakistan.

It comes on top of record-breaking heat waves in China and South Asia, the worst drought in Europe in 500 years, the continuing megadrought in the U.S. Southwest, massive wildfires in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, France, and Germany, and catastrophic floods in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Evidence of a climate emergency could hardly be clearer. In Bill McKibben’s words, “We live on a different planet than we used to.”

Fortunately, there are solutions at hand that don’t require bleeding edge technologies. They do, however, require political will to implement, and that’s why the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is so important.

Clearly, the IRA doesn’t approach the scale demanded by the current climate crisis, but it sets the ball in motion, creating a dynamic that could very well generate its own momentum. Finally, after years of inaction, the federal government has exerted powerful leadership to deal with a rapidly warming world.

Signed into law by President Biden earlier this month, the IRA commits $369 billion to carrying out climate and clean energy measures, by far the largest such investment in U.S. history. Adopting a carrots rather than stick approach, it represents a major change in policy direction. Instead of calling for carbon taxes to discourage fossil fuel use, it focuses on incentives to spur investments in renewables and energy efficiency, mainly in form of tax credits.

The IRA is far more modest than the Build Back Better Act and it includes significant concessions to the fossil fuel industry. Even so it’s projected to cut U.S. emissions by 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. Economists, furthermore, estimate that Americans will save as much as $200 billion over the next decade on electricity bills thanks to the new law, challenging the belief that the energy transition will mean higher prices.

Perhaps the best thing about the IRA is the fact that it comes right as the adoption of renewables has picked up dramatic speed. As David Wallace-Wells observes, the public investment will benefit from “much broader tailwinds” than just a few years ago. For example, the amount of electricity generated by renewable resources in the U.S., which was only 8.6% in April 2001, hit a record 28% this April.

In fact, wind and solar installations have made up an impressive majority of new power plants added to the national grid in recent years. In the first six months of 2022 wind and solar accounted for two-thirds of the new U.S. electrical generating capacity. The country’s investments in clean energy have grown from $10 billion in 2004 to $105 billion in 2021.

Globally, the picture is similarly positive; renewable energy production has increased 400% in the past decade. The renewable investment of $226 billion worldwide in the first half of 2022 set a new record, jumping 11% in the first six months relative to same period in 2021. Investment in solar was up 33% and 16% in wind. Renewables are now the cheapest form of power in many countries, including the U.S.

So, yes, the sea level is rising and that’s scary. But the shift to renewables is accelerating and that’s exciting. There’s little question that climate chaos is causing great damage and will continue to do so. If we work hard to push the energy transition forward, however, we can limit this destruction and bequeath a better world to the generations that follow us.

Coronavirus and the Climate Crisis

/ Peter Bardaglio / 2 Comments

The sudden appearance and rapid spread of the coronavirus is an unsettling reminder of how chaotic and uncertain the world can be. Seemingly out of the blue, this new and deadly virus is upending life across the globe — the latest reports identify almost 50 countries that have confirmed cases of infection.

In China, the epicenter of the outbreak, manufacturing, construction, and other economic activities have dramatically slowed down and even come to a halt, while air travel in the country has decreased by 70 percent. As a result, China’s carbon dioxide emissions over the past three weeks have declined by 25 percent.
A significant majority of American voters now support the Green New Deal.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that a similar unraveling of daily life is what the climate emergency has in store for us. The sense of foreboding is palpable. The fragility of modern life, its dependence on complex webs of supply chains, intricate social systems, infrastructure, and technology: all of it is up for grabs as we confront an epic series of disasters.

“Not all that long ago,” David Wallace-Wells observed this week, “climate change was a story unfolding only in the future tense.” Now, though, it has come “roaring into the present with a terrifying fury.” The incineration of one quarter of Australia’s forests in a single fire season underscores his point.

The ravages of climate destabilization, of course, are not confined to environmental destruction. Rising sea levels, extended droughts, flash floods, and wild fires are perhaps its most obvious manifestations. But less visible developments such as malaria, malnutrition, and heat stress will just as surely cause death and misery for millions of people as the climate crisis accelerates. If only global warming could inspire the kind of collective action that our fear of epidemics does.

More than ever, we need to remember that our fates as individuals and nations are intertwined. The poorest countries, as well as the most marginalized communities in the developed world, will continue to find themselves exposed disproportionately to the havoc that is underway. Just as doctors and nurses are rushing forward into the fray to care for patients struck down by COVID-19, the more fortunate among us need to act with a keen awareness that we are all in this together. It’s not just a question of morality; the survival of human civilization depends on it. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Greenland and the Climate Emergency

/ Peter Bardaglio / 1 Comment

One of the signature features of our times is the dramatic disconnect between the speed with which the climate emergency is unfurling, on the one hand, and our ability to integrate this reality into our day-to-day life, on the other. In an article earlier this summer, David Wallace-Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019), reflected on what he called the “phenomenon of cascading climate impacts.”
An iceberg off the Greenland coast this summer. Photo by Harry and Rowena Kennedy licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

“How many natural disasters does it take to qualify as biblical, or apocalyptic, or at least to make us understand that we are living not through a bad week, or a bad year, but an unraveling climate system in which so much of what we take for granted as permanent features of the built environment may be turned into flotsam and jetsam by unprecedented weather?” he asked.

His haunting question came to mind this month as I read one report after another about the record ice melt in Greenland. Scientists estimate that by the end of the summer something like 440 billion tons of ice will have melted or calved off Greenland’s giant ice sheet.

In just five days from July 31 to August 3, more than 58 billion tons melted from the surface of the world’s largest island, 40 billion tons more than average for this time of year. That’s not taking into account the huge ice chunks breaking off into the ocean or warm water attacking the glaciers from below.

Just since the 1990s, Greenland’s rate of ice loss has increased from 41 gigatons per year to 286 gigatons per year during the period from 2010 to 2018. A recent study found that, if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut significantly in the next decade or two, Greenland could contribute up to two feet of global sea level rise by 2100.

How does one even begin to comprehend the enormity of this catastrophe?

Wallace-Wells suggests that our capacity for denial and compartmentalization may be such that we actually never come to grips with what we are doing and the threat that it poses to our very existence. Instead, we simply incorporate each new horrifying event into a “new normal” and move on. Even more disconcerting, Wallace-Wells thinks we may begin to find ourselves normalizing ” clear and terrifying patterns,” not just single instances of extreme weather events and climate disasters such as the India heat wave in June or the vast, ongoing fires in the Amazon.

At that point, obviously, our doom will be sealed. We must do everything possible, then, to keep reminding ourselves that nothing about what is happening to our climate and its impacts is normal. We must keep talking with each other and finding ways to act collectively that push back against any of this from becoming normal.

As Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old activist who has called for a global climate strike on September 20, reminds us, ” Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this.”